Mac OS X market share dips in February ’08

Mac OS X, as well as Safari, lose a little ground during February, according …

Web metrics firm Net Applications has released market share data for February. The numbers may make for a reversal among those accepting or rejecting the methodology, depending upon how strongly one feels about Apple. For those who don't know, Net Applications gets their numbers from web surfers.

We use a unique methodology for collecting this data.
We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive
on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from
approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information
published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted
website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information
is summarized on a monthly basis.

It's about who is using the Internet, a method that likely favors the Mac over Windows. Macs sell almost exclusively to consumers and academic institutions in relatively wealthy countries. Windows does the same, but also sells to businesses around the world too. This likely includes more machines not on the Internet. So what the hell happened last month?

Perhaps it was nothing more than a plateau after three big months of gains, but Mac OS X dropped slightly from January to February. However, to give the doomsayers their due, there was a precipitous drop in PPC Mac numbers that was not made up by Intel Mac numbers. Could it be that the robust growth the Mac platform has seen has been more a result of PPC Mac users making the transition to Intel Macs? No, but giving the permanently embittered a little hope just makes their suffering worse later. New Macs, including the "radically thin" MacBook Air, will almost assuredly mean solid numbers for next month's quarterly earnings report.

Not surprisingly, Safari also saw a decline from last month, and again, one could argue this is circumstantial evidence of PPC users transitioning to Intel. Net Applications had some problems displaying the data on its website, but it sure looks like there was a big drop in people using Safari 1 and Safari 2. Users of those browsers would have been far more likely to be using a PPC Mac, at least one would hope so... running Leopard and Safari 3 on a G3 *shudder*. The logic follows that those users who recently upgraded to an Intel Mac would have taken their ancient PPC Macs offline. It's a theory, anyway.

Finally, the iPhone saw another increase in usage of 0.01 percent, which puts it at 0.14 percent. Keep in mind the iPhone is classified as an operating system, so it's not an utterly insignificant number, unless you are Linux with a 0.65 percent market share.

Next month's earnings report will be interesting. Analysts are predicting another 2 million Mac quarter. Considering the drop in stock price over the last two months, Apple had better not disappoint. March numbers from Net Applications might be very interesting indeed.